Defense Logistics Agency Embraces AI.

• Author: Tadjdeh, Yasmin

* The Defense Logistics Agency--which is tasked with managing the global supply chain for the armed services--is gungho about using artificial intelligence across its enterprise.

"There's unlimited applications at DLA," said Jesse Rowlands, a data scientist at the agency's Analytics Center of Excellence.

The DLA enterprise is sprawling--it facilitates more than $37 billion in goods and services annually, employs 26,000 civilian and military personnel, operates in most U.S. states and 28 countries and supports more than 2,400 weapon systems, according to its website.

For many organizations, when they think about applying artificial intelligence to their mission or business plan, they focus on the big picture, Rowlands said.

They think, '"let's create a Siri or an Alexa or let's create a whole procurement system,'" he said. "But really, 90 percent of the projects are going to be individual to an office."

For example, AI could be deployed in human resources offices, or fraud, waste and abuse departments, he noted.

Much of the value of artificial intelligence "is going to be small iterations and small models," he said. "You can deploy a model that affects 10 people but... you're helping that office quadruple the workload it can handle. That's not a groundbreaking newspaper story, but you do a bunch of those and you're having a big effect on the bottom line of the agency that you're working at."

For those involved in data science, which is Rowlands' job, AI is viewed as a tool in a toolbox, he noted.

"What we are really concerned about at the data scientist level is, one,... [having a] framework where I can work on any project; and two, what's the business problem?" he said. "That's really going to determine what we can do."

Rowlands described DLA as being in the "growth phase" of deploying AI. It has several grassroots projects across the agency, including in its research-and-development department and analytics center.

"We have in-house projects going, but we also have... healthy R&D efforts going," he said. Those include initatives to predict demand, lead time and spare parts requirements.

DLA is currently contracting those programs to industry, Rowlands said. He did not disclose which companies are participating.

The next step is creating a comprehensive AI strategy for the agency, he said.

"How do we organize this enterprise-wide with... a structure so we're not all doing a bunch of individualistic things?" he said.

Rowlands said there is...